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Thursday, September 26, 2013

Robert Hunt: Emerging Languages (Part II)

Today's post is by guest blogger Dr. Robert A. Hunt,
Director of Global Theological Education, Professor of Christian
Mission and Interreligious Relations, and Director of the Center for
Evangelism and Missional Church Studies at Perkins School of Theology at SMU. This post is the final of four by Dr. Hunt over the month of September and a continuation of his post last week.

As
I explained in the first part of this post,
United Methodist unity will not be based on either existing commonalities of
commitment to justice or historical roots.Rather, I would suggest, it will be based on a commitment to an emerging
understanding of the work of the Spirit that doesn't privilege any Methodist
community or presuppose the direction in which the Spirit blows us. In short it
will be a unity based on the presupposition that God desires unity for God's
people, but has not yet revealed the shape of that unity.

Is
that a justifiable theological presupposition? Is it a practical
possibility?

The
second question is easier to answer than the first. One of the most universally
observed human phenomena is the way in which new languages emerge out of
the encounter of different cultures and language groups. (It is observable,
but it is only by being universally observed that it becomes the basis
of any unifying discourse.) Through dialogue - often simple but growing in
depth and complexity - people with different worldviews and cultural
experiences find a common language that allows them to articulate their
differences and similarities and in particular name the latter with more and
more precision.

English
happens to exhibit a remarkable flexibility in this regard, both borrowing and
loaning words and expressions with shocking promiscuity. But the history of any
language demonstrates the degree to which it has been the result of mutual transformations
that make it better and better able to account for the wide variety of human
experiences of its speakers and communicate in the widest possible public
forum.

I
believe that dialogue, call it “holy conferencing” if you will, is capable of generating
an emerging language able to express a not-yet-discovered unity of Methodist
experience.

However,
if at a practical level, dialogue can create a common language for the
experience of being United Methodist, is such an approach to seeking unity
theologically justified?

I
suggest that Christian unity, and specifically Methodist unity, is not
something scandalously lost after the age of the apostles or Wesley. Instead
unity is something that is inevitably emergent because the essential
encounter with the Christ is finding him in the crossing of cultural and
experiential boundaries. The New Testament is in fact a record of disunity
among the followers of Christ. They are moving toward unity but always,
impelled by their own personal encounters with Christ, reaching into
difference-creating realms of human experience. The apostles could never be
unified because Christ himself, in their own record of faith, compelled them to
break any tenuous uniformity of belief and practice and discover his Spirit in
places where those who name him as savior compose their experience with
different beliefs and reiterate those beliefs in different practices.

There
is also a deeper theological rationale for a commitment to present diversity
accompanied by a dialogue toward an emergent unity. God has created a universe
whose future is open because (at the basic earthly level) God's creatures are
free. The presumption that unity can be achieved at this or that General
Conference through this or that legislative process and these or those unifying
beliefs and practices is a presumption against God's intent that humans be both
free and that this freedom extend as far as the human imagination can cast
itself into the future.

For
freedom in the Biblical witness creates diversity, and this freedom, which
diversifies rather than unifying, must sometimes be forced upon a humanity
willing to enslave itself for the sake of unity and its consequent promise of
security and power (see Genesis 11). God will not let us drag the unity we find
only in God into the idolatrous structures that we create. We
cannot live at Sinai or Jerusalem any more than we can live in Babel or Egypt,
for each finally enslaves whether our intentions are holy or mundane.

In
short, it is not God's will that we be unified except in our love one for the
other. Rather, we should be ever seeking unity. A perpetual dialogue appears to
be what God has in mind when we read across the scripture toward an end in
which the peoples of the earth unceasingly bring their varied gifts to God's
Holy City. And that dialogue is not between partners fixed in their
language and positions and negotiating a middle ground, but rather between
partners themselves being transformed and diversified by the process of
"going to all nations to make disciples."

Of
course my assertions in the paragraphs above must themselves be mere beginning
points in dialogue, in this case a dialogue around a Bible we all accept, in
some way, as foundational to our experience of Christ. Worship might be another
such starting point.

I
do not believe that global United Methodism is either possible or desirable.
But United Methodists should seek through loving dialogue to learn an ever
renewed and renewing language of Christian experience. That process will lead
us toward, but never closer to, the Holy City where in God's presence alone
exists our unity; a unity seen fleetingly at moments, but never grasped, and
never seen again unless we turn away to speak with our brothers and sisters in
Christ.